Council formed by Cuomo will look beyond the state for funds

A regional economic development council established by Gov. Andrew Cuomo to review and recommend projects for state funding, will also seek support from federal and private sources, its co-chairs said Thursday.

“We’re going to be looking at how we can leverage other sources of capital from the private and federal sectors,” said Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy and co-chair of the Capital Region council. She and co-chair Michael Castellana, president and CEO of SEFCU, spoke with media following a meeting of The Capital Region Economic Development at the SEFCU headquarters off Washington Avenue in Albany Thursday morning.

The council met to review its strategic plan and discuss what it will do in 2012.

During that session, an audience member asked whether the council would be applying for grants through two federal programs, including one sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

“We really need to think about that and think of those as additional funding,” Jackson said after the meeting. “We’re going to give more attention to very specific projects.”

The local council was one of 10 established across the state by Cuomo in an effort to provide a more organized approach in the pursuit of state economic development funding and add a bit of competition among different regions to the process.

Irene Baker, director of regional economic development councils at Empire State Development Corp., said the application process would be much more user-friendly this year than last. One challenge: how to remain nimble with confidential, high-priority, time-sensitive projects.

“There does need to be a mechanism that allows a review of projects on a confidential basis,” said F. Michael Tucker, president and CEO of the Albany-based Center for Economic Growth and a member of the local council. “Maybe they don’t want their competition to know they’re in the hunt” for a new plant, he added.

“It’s companies looking for incentives to move or expand here that create an issue of how to review and improve the process,” Tucker said.

Baker said the number one complaint in the first year was that economic development wasn’t an annual process.

That issue of timing, Tucker said after the meeting, needs to be addressed.

“If the project qualifies for state funding,” he said, “the state funding cycle needs to match the project timing.”